Ms Camille Loftus:

-----these and even before the Housing Alliance existed. These were the organisations that were saying that cost rental would be a game changer. However, it will only be a game changer if we get to do it at scale. Some 6,000 probably will not make a significant difference to any rental market over the next number of years.

That is part of the reason we are arguing that the debt is a problem. When one looks at developed not-for-profit sectors elsewhere in Europe, all of them rely very heavily on borrowing and nobody has any problem with relying on it. However, they are well into their maturation cycles now. They hold large sections of the market. Therefore, they have the capacity and flexibility to do that there. We are not at that point. The sector just has not had the time and opportunity to get itself up to that scale yet.

Cost rental is very important to us from that point of view. We want to see the rolling programme in place as soon as possible. We know for the Department that a lot of the complexities we are dealing with at the moment are the kinds of things that are slowing it down in that regard. Over the next number of years, I know from members’ current plans that there are about 2,500 cost rentals in the pipeline at the moment. However, we are very eager to go much more ambitious than that. To be honest, my first reaction when I saw Housing for All in terms of the target for cost rental was that it was not high enough.